Frank Rich is a writer-at-large for New York magazine. His books include Ghost Light, a memoir, and The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America. He is an Executive Producer of the HBO series Veep.

IN THE REVIEW

Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

When Bob Hope died in 2003 at the age of one hundred, attention was not widely paid. The “entertainer of the century” had long been regarded by many Americans (if they regarded him at all) “as a cue-card-reading antique, cracking dated jokes about buxom beauty queens and Gerald Ford’s golf game.” A year before his death, The Onion had published the fake headline “World’s Last Bob Hope Fan Dies of Old Age.” Though Hope still had champions among comedy luminaries who had grown up idolizing him, Christopher Hitchens was in sync with the new century’s consensus when he memorialized him as “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny.”

The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan

edited by Albert J. Devlin with Marlene J. Devlin

In 1999, four years before his death at age ninety-four, a shaky-looking Elia Kazan appeared on prime-time television to receive an honorary Oscar. To many watching at home, Kazan’s brief turn was an obligatory detour on the way to what proved that year’s main event, the upset victory of Shakespeare …

JFK, Conservative

by Ira Stoll

Without the halo of martyrdom and the mob-and-CIA-populated conspiracy theories generated by the assassination—and without the voluptuous video record of Kennedy’s grace, charisma, and wit—would his White House tenure poll so high? Probably not. It’s telling that his death has a greater afterlife than his presidency.

The Promise: President Obama, Year One

by Jonathan Alter

The Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama, a mere chief executive, to follow. Only Hollywood might have the power to create a superhero who could fulfill the messianic dreams kindled by his presence and rhetoric, maintain the riveting drama of his unlikely ascent, and sustain the national mood of deliverance that greeted his victory. As soon as Inauguration Day turned to night, the real Obama was destined to depreciate like the shiny new luxury car that starts to lose its book value the moment it’s driven off the lot.

When, in the summer of 1968, Norman Mailer covered the Republican and Democratic conventions on assignment for Harper’s magazine, he was forty-five, an aging rebel looking for a new cause. He had started to drift restlessly from his single-minded pursuit of the Great American Novel into filmmaking and journalism, two …

Such was the low estate of the Bush administration in American public opinion that the Democrats did even better than expected in the midterm elections of 2006, especially in their narrow takeover of the Senate. The most revealing upset came in Virginia, where Jim Webb, a much-decorated Vietnam veteran, fierce …